Jake had seen far too many friends die because of blown OpSec. He would have been alarmed to get too much information he didn’t need to know, rather than the reverse.
“Now, as far as I know, that Epetar facility is one hundred percent legitimate. And if we get indications of an imminent terrorist attack against it, you are to reinforce your token detachment. However, in service to DAG’s primary mission, you may have to exercise some independent judgment on this one. Out of school, I am not happy. If I could give you clearer orders, I would, just to ensure any crap afterwards falls on me instead of you. I do not trust these Epetar people and I flat do not know what you’re going to find up there. If it goes to hell, I’ll back your play, Jake. Back on the record, we’re good soldiers, and good soldiers obey orders, hooah?”
“Roger that, sir,” Mosovich said unhappily. This mission already stank to hell and gone.
“Two squads, I know that’s an unusually low detachment, but it is the absolute minimum we can send for this. My chain of command ordered us to send a few men up there, but they’ve quietly let it be known that we’re not to over-do the corporate hand-holding, either. The fewer men we send, the less potential they have to wind up in the middle of some corporate clusterfuck where the politicians decide which side we were supposed to have been on after the fact.” Pennington grimaced. He was a good officer, and good officers hated having to drop their men in the shit.
“Hooah,” Jake said.
The rest of the conversation concerned the finer points of golf, a sport the general avidly pursued. Mosovich hadn’t attained his current rank without a rounding out of this part of his military education. It wasn’t a hobby of his own, but he could hold up his end of the discussion. In this case, Pennington wasn’t talking from real interest, anyway, but just to provide necessary social noise in case someone was watching.
The food was excellent. His CO left a tip that expressed ample appreciation for its quality, along with that of all the other services just provided.
As a first day, George’s started out normally enough. Loud music in his ear too damn early, hitting the snooze button, donning stiflingly boring corporate clothes, chugging a cup of his own bad coffee, black, rushing out the door. If traffic hadn’t blessed him with extraordinary luck, he would have been late. As it was, he walked in the door two minutes early and congratulated himself on living up to his resolution to be on time, every time.
He knew someone would have to meet him to walk him in, but he hadn’t expected it to be Ms. Felini herself. She wore a deep blue sweater-dress of something soft that clung and released as she moved, revealing every detail of her body, including the fact that she had plenty of upper body support without artificial aid. Her nipples stood out like pebbles underneath the dress, though they hadn’t a moment before. She saw his appreciative look and ran her hands down the sides of her thighs, smoothing her skirt.
“On your first day, I thought I’d like to come for you myself. We can get to know each other better while I give you the tour,” she said.
As she was saying this, she had come up beside him and taken his arm, draping herself on it so that her breast pressed against it. He reflected that his right arm was getting one hell of a lot of action lately. She acted as if this were perfectly normal, friendly behavior. Well, perhaps it was normal. For her. They walked together to the elevator. He reminded himself of her beautiful face as it had looked in the control room on the cube he had viewed. Safer to screw a Bengal tiger.
In the course of scanning her ident card at the elevator bank, she contrived to brush more of her admittedly very attractive body against him. “I hope you don’t mind my being friendly. It’s part of our organizational culture. We’re all very close, here. We work hard, and play hard. I hope you’re the kind of man who can work hard and play hard, too, Mark. Are you?”
For a few seconds, George had almost forgotten his cover’s name. He reminded himself of how many times he had played the same kind of sexual games that this one was playing on him, with women he could use in his own missions. Better to play a mark than be one. He swallowed, hard, nodding nervously.
“Good,” she purred. “You should be a very good fit. For the company.”
As the elevator climbed to the third floor and the personnel department, he could smell her hair. “Your shampoo smells nice. Something like roses and apples,” he said.
“Apples? Nobody’s ever told me that before,” she laughed, running a hand over said hair and pushing it into place.
As he said the trigger word, the elevator acquired a certain sharpness and clarity for him. He would form memories of the facility and events very precisely until he spoke the second trigger word to turn it off. At his debrief in the evening, he’d pour out everything he knew in every valuable detail. He couldn’t possibly get a recording device or any media in, so he was the recording device.
In personnel, Prida excused herself, telling him she had something to take care of and would be back about the time he was done. The personnel clerk checked out a buckley PDA to him with firm instructions that it was never to leave the premises. The first thing George did with the PDA was select his cover’s favorite personality overlay. The second thing he did was fill out forms. Lots and lots of forms.
True to her word, Prida was back and escorted him to her own office, for what she referred to as orientation. She motioned him to a chair in front of her desk and shut the door behind them. Walking around behind the desk she asked, “How much do you know about what we do here? Anything?”
“Only that you need my skills and you pay well.”
“Well, one obviously has to know more than that.” She set her own buckley on the desk. “I’ve got a cube to show you,” she said, bending down behind the desk to open a drawer. “After we deal with the preliminaries.”
When she sat up, she was wearing a headset he recognized, and he froze as the psychopathic nymphomaniac penetrated his mind, locking his will in an immovable grip.
“You will never, ever, ever tell anyone at all, outside those people in the company with whom we authorize you to work, anything about your job here or anything from those elevator doors on in,” she ordered. “Do you understand? Answer.”
“Yes. I understand,” he found himself replying, as she squirmed greasily in the raw places of his mind. It felt like something out of SERE training. Bluntly, it pissed him off.
“Good. Now stand up and drop trou,” she grinned. “You look too yummy to resist.”
To his disbelief, he found he didn’t even have the ability to hesitate. None of the background information had indicated that they were able to control people immediately, with no prep work. This op could start to go real bad just about now.
She knelt in front of him with a lazy smile.
“You can do yourself up now,” she told him later, sinuously arching her back as she rose up into a full stretch from the vivid red tips of her toes, in her open-toed stilletos, up to her outstretched fingertips. She sat down on her desk, spinning and kicking her legs over the side to slide into her seat, like something out of a fucking nightclub act.
“I love a little quickie in the morning,” she said.
She took the headset off. “All done.” She made a shooing motion towards the door. “Go on, I’ve got to get this thing back down to operations. I hope you’ll enjoy working with us.”
“What about that cube you mentioned?” he gulped, endeavoring to look like a normal guy who’d just been both mind-probed and blown by his boss on the first day.
“Oh. That. There isn’t one. I just wanted to lighten up that nasty security induction with a little present, because I like you. Have a great day.”